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September 18, 2009
September 10, 2009
Incoming Links - Part 2
In the first post in this series I talked about links in the context of the web, the importance of building up a good amount of high quality incoming links, Google PageRank and its potential influence on the ranking of pages in Google’s search engine results.
I also outlined the characteristics that make up a high quality link.
So how would you know:
• How many incoming links yours, or any other web page has
• and what the Google PageRank of a page is?
Checking with Google itself can be a little frustrating because most of Google’s capacity is focused on advancing the accuracy of its search engine technology, and not on displaying how many links a page has.
For example, an accepted method for checking links is to type “link:” followed by the full URL or web address into the search box of a search engine or Yahoo or Google.
The result of doing so would be the loading of a page displaying a list of links, snippets (or descriptions) and web addresses. Carrying out this activity with Google is in most cases likely to produce a page containing very few or no links that is not representative of the actual amount of incoming links that are likely to be pointing to your pages - for the reason I’ve just stated. Contrary to popular belief, the incoming links that Google does display are not the ‘highest quality’ links according to Google, but merely a random sample.
To get a much more comprehensive view of the amount of incoming links a page has, using Google to find out this information, you will need to sign up to Google tools. Once there, as part of the many services encompassed in this package, you can see a good number of the links that Google records as pointing to your website.
Using Yahoo to find out how many incoming links a page has seems to be more effective in terms of convenience and speed. Quite simply, go to (for example) www.yahoo.co.uk, and type into the search box at the top of the page “link:” immediately followed by the full URL of the website or page you are checking. By this I mean add the full prefix http://www. The result will be a page showing the number of incoming links that Yahoo considers the web page to have. These will be hyperlinked so you can click through to them to examine the nature and position of the link for yourself.
There are a number of benefits of doing so including:
• Checking your competitors’ incoming links could reveal linking opportunities for your own pages that you hadn’t thought of.
• Competitor micro-sites, blogs and other pages could be revealed, could help you better monitor your competitors’ web marketing activities, and could lead to useful ideas for your own web tactics.
• Checking the quality characteristics of the link (e.g. relevant key phrases in the anchor text) could allow you to contact the link provider and make minor adjustments if possible to gain as much benefit form the link as possible.
• Spotting possible problem links among your own incoming links i.e. links that could violate Google’s guidelines such as ‘dubious’ paid for links or links for .edu domains.
What kinds of links does Google like or dislike?
This question can be answered broadly and the specifics of it are likely to be changing constantly.
By this I mean that contrary to popular belief, rather than Google changing it’s algorithms relating links a few times a year with an instantly noticeable effect, Google is actually more likely to be changing its link-related algorithms 300 or 400 times a year.
When you think about it, these frequent and small incremental changes are much more practical in achieving Google’s aims, and much more likely to maintain a good relationship between Google and its customers than just having just a few drastic and seismic shake-ups. Due the to the inter-connected nature of the web itself, even some small incremental changes have noticeable effects sometimes.
Looking at the quality of links, ideally, with good quality, interesting, original, and regularly updated content, web pages are naturally likely to attract very ‘natural patterns of links. These are likely to be valued by Google.
The notion of paid-for links is likely to be a potential problem area. It is likely that Google would prefer links to occur through some kind of merit rather than paying a flat fee to obtain a number of links. Paid-for links bought in quantity are also unlikely to posess the same degree of relevance and relevant context, and are probably less likely to be favoured by Google.
Links from .edu domains have been know for some time to be something that Google is not particularly keen on – possible for some of the reasons I’ve just stated.
Due to Google’s liking for natural patterns e.g. in the writing of text on web pages, and in incoming link patterns – possibly as a way of weeding out spammy pages – it is likely that buying in large numbers of incoming links that all contain the same link text, and are all introduced in a short space of time is going to set alarm bells ringing.
How and Where can you get incoming links from?
Incoming links don’t have to just come from the web pages of suppliers, associates, friends, or via reciprocal linking schemes. Here are some examples of possible sources for your incoming links:
Getting links from directories is only useful if the directories are good quality i.e. are useful ones to users. Google for instance prefers directories that have some degree of editorial oversight.
Blogs may be a good way to get incoming links, and they offer the benefit of control over what appears in the incoming link text / anchor text. They are also incidentally a good way of getting enquiries and business in their own right.
Your other websites or microsites can also be a source of incoming links – the advantage is that you have a very high degree of control over the links – the quality is the most important thing.
Submitting articles to article directories (and press release websites) with links back to your pages can also be helpful if the article directories themselves are good quality and provide a good user experience.
To sum up then, Google is likely to prefer natural linking patterns, and is likely to give less value to and possibly guard against some kinds of links – for example, many paid-for links and dubious linking schemes.
There are some pro-active ways that you can get some good quality incoming links to your website – for example via
Blogs
Article submission websites,
High quality directories
Your other web pages and microsites.
Incoming Links - Part 1
One of the great features of the web is its inter-connectivity – how may web pages link to many other web Navigating or ‘surfing’ as it was christened allows a free style of movement from one page, and one site to another via the hyperlinks in web pages.
Typically, links are used to provide context, a better explanation of and further information about the subject you are reading about on a web page.
Since most people use the web for research of some kind – whether it is research about a potential purchase, research for work, leisure or study – the web’s structure allows speedy gathering of information, and speedy, relatively easy transactions of all kinds.
With the modern web, the idea of inserting these ‘hyperlinks’ within your web pages, blog pages etc, be they from text or graphic elements, has always helped to maintain this structure.
The rise of and the increasing use of the Internet for commercial activities, and in many cases the ability of web pages to perform many functions from promotion through to handling the sale and payment of goods and services, coupled with the rise an now dominance of Google as a search engine of choice and a major referrer of visitors to your web pages have changed the way links are thought of and used.
Of all the visitors to your web pages for example, assuming that there are a significant number at present, I would guess that Google would be typically delivering at least 50% of them to you. If you are running PPC campaigns with Google, which is a paid-for advertising service, it is likely that this figure will be even higher. Assuming that you have a web stats, or web analytics package or system in place, it would also not be unusual to see other popular search engines only accounting for less than 5% each at most of the visitors delivered to your web pages.
It would probably be fair to say that everybody, and certainly most organisations and traders would like their web pages to appear at the top of Google’s search results for as many important and potentially lucrative key phrases as possible.
Therefore SEO or search optimisation of your web pages is often an exercise in making sure your pages fit within the guidelines of, and are as attractive possible to, and function as well as possible within Google’s systems.
The potential interest, enquiries, business and ultimately profits that could be gained from basically appearing anywhere as near as possible to the top of first page of Google search results have meant that we can all expect stiff competition when trying to get there. With so much at stake, and the kind of diffused, detached and distant feelings of responsibility that simply using YOUR computer could give you, it’s no wonder than there is a good deal of foul as well as fair means being used to reach these top spots.
It’s also the case that many people simply aren’t aware of, or don’t have time to make a study of where some of these boundaries lie.
Search engines on the other hand, such as Google, need people to continue using them on a regular basis, and in preference to other search engines.
Google has long known that in order to do this, they need to deliver their users which are essentially their customers before they become your customers, to the pages that best meet their search needs.
For this to happen, they need good, sophisticated search engine technology, that consistently delivers high quality, useful, relevant results, but is as easy as possible for users to operate. Google’s obviously worked very hard in this area.
What is an incoming link?
Ideally, it is a link from another page on the web, housed at another domain.
If you have the ability to check your incoming links (which I will go into in the next video in this series), you will see that the link architecture of your web pages i.e. the links between your own web pages (where it’s relevant to do so) can also be counted as incoming links.
An outgoing link is a hyperlink from one of your web pages, to another domain i.e. another page on the web, housed at a different domain to your own. It is commonplace for web pages to have for example a ‘links’ page that contains outgoing links.
So, where do incoming links fit into this, and why are they so important to your web pages?
With greater education among, resources and training available to webmasters / website owners, consider for a moment that it’s possible for two different web pages to optimised to more or less the same degree for more or less the same key phrases. Imagine also if you will that there are new pages all the time being developed, which may also be aligned toward the same key phrases.
One of Google’s main tasks as I said earlier was to deliver the search results that best fit the query. If several pages are equally relevant to a key phrase, how will Google choose which one should rank above another?
Google needs therefore to decide not just which page is most relevant, but which pages are also the most ‘important’ for specific key phrases.
Google’s PageRank – the kind of scoring system or poll – is one way that Google uses to decide and indicate which pages may be more ‘important’ than others. Google states that it uses 200 or so measurements when deciding how to categorise and rank a web page, but it would be fair to say that having a good number of high quality incoming links to a page is highly likely to increase its importance as well as its relevance, and in doing so, can make it rank more highly in the search engine results. PageRank is a score from 0 to 10 allocated to a page in relation to this.
The underlying basic assumption, is that is a someone links to your page, you page must somehow be important or interesting. This calculation system is named after Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, and hence PageRank is quite different to where pages rank in the search engine results. It is important to note that it is essentially the QUALITY of the incoming link that counts, not the quantity.
What makes a high quality incoming link?
When judging the quality of a link, search engines such as Google are interested in being able to establish good ‘CONTEXT’ for the link i.e. to a degree, how relevant is the incoming link to the subject matter of the page it is linking to?
Essentially there are 4 main factors:
1. The text on the page that the link comes from.
How relevant is the text content of that page to the text content of the page it is linking to? Is the subject matter related to the subject matter of the page it is linking to?
In deciding this, Google can help to ensure that it is ‘fairly’ ranking the importance of a page, thus helping to guard the integrity and quality of its search engine results, and at the same time is guarding against for example, paid-for links from irrelevant pages.
2. Does the anchor text – the blue hyperlink itself – contain a text phrase that is relevant to the page it is linking to? For example, by including the domain name as the actual link itself (provided it contains no relevant key phrases) of the words ‘click here’, these would be unlikely to have any relevance to the content of the page they are linking to. As such, they would devalue the link compared to a blue hyperlink that was itself made up of a relevant key phrase to the page it’s linking to.
3. Are there many other outgoing links from the page that links to yours (as an incoming link) and if so, are they relevant links? Google for instance would be doing a couple of things here. If the links on the other page were all unrelated in nature and subject matter – and it’s highly likely they’d be text links anyway e.g. from somebody’s dedicated links page, it’s highly unlikely that the text on the page would be relevant to the page its; linking to anyway.
Also, a feature of ‘dubious’ linking schemes, link farms and paid-for link schemes, is that they are often long pages with lots of different links coming from them. Google seems to value these paid-for, often irrelevant links much less – in fact they’re likely to violate the Google guidelines, and as such, might not do your site any favours. Pages with very few outgoing links on them, that are related and relevant in subject matter are much less likely to be dubious as regards the guidelines, and therefore can be valued higher.
4. What is the Google PageRank of the page that is supplying the link?
If the page that the link is coming from has itself got a good PageRank e.g. 3 or 4 out of 10, Google has already accepted the importance of this page, and therefore a link from it is likely to be beneficial.
It may also be important if this higher ranking page was deemed to be ‘important’ for keywords related to those found in the page it’s linking to.
Ultimately, and ideally, providing good, interesting, informative, original content on your pages should in itself attract natural links, and it is these kinds of natural links, and natural linking patterns that are likely to be particularly valued by Google.
To Sum up:
Good quality incoming links to your web pages can increase their Google PageRank, and improve their position in the search engine rankings for your important key phrases.
September 8, 2009
Reminder about YouTube
Reminder about YouTube
Checkout http://www.mklink.com/getstarted for more internet marketing tips
I know I’ve already told you about the power of YouTube but I wanted to re-iterate a few points.
I’m doing this because I recently ran one of my freebie seminars and mentioned YouTube in passing yet some of the comments I got back made me realise most people really don’t get the point of what I’m saying.
Firstly, think of YouTube as a SEARCH ENGINE, because that’s exactly what it is. Most people think of it just as some place to watch video clips.
It is a SEARCH ENGINE that happens to index video clips.
But think about this, if I told you that you can get your website ranked in GOOGLE within minutes(yes minutes, not weeks or months) then you might begin to appreciate that this fact is important.
But how many of your competitors are doing this? Typically very few. Which means that if you can be bothered to spend a few quid on a camera and basic software and lighting, you can outstrip all your competitors STRAIGHT AWAY.
Let’s get things into perspective. Almost EVERYONE these days(esp. in the UK) has a mobile phone that supports video. More people are watching more media ONLINE than ever before and this trend is not reversing. Over 60% of the data downloaded these days is video format(because it is bulkier than images & text)
Because internet speeds are getting better all the time, more and more people are watching video which means you should be in front of them.
So you should be using it because it is still relatively untapped by most people marketing online and YouTube is owned by Google, leveraging a huge subscriber base.
Use YouTube to solve people’s problems, which is root of all sales and marketing, whether online or not.
How much easier is it for someone to see how a fishing a fly is tied properly on YouTube rather than out of a book?
How much better can a language school demonstrate how to speak Spanish than by actually doing it - rather than just WRITING about it?
How much more effective is it to demonstrate how to put a garden shed together on YouTube than just single pictures alone?(we’ve all put something together one time where we end up with more screws than we started and the thing is back to front).
If nothing else, just TALK to your visitors and show them who you are, even if you’re only have a face “designed for radio” like mine.
Your visitors can leave feedback on your clips, recommend them to their friends, make suggestions - so it’s a great way to get started into the whole “social networking” thing.
Remember, people buy from people.
YouTube is massive, gets listed super fast in Google results, enables you to very cheaply increase your traffic, conversion rate and branding yet it is still relatively untapped because most people are just focusing on the “normal” search results.
Test it. Upload a video, tag it and see how long it takes to get found.
Of course, there are loads of other video sites you can syndicate your content with as well but I mention YouTube because it’s the biggest, most widely known and very, very easy to use & get going.
More YouTube information at http://mklink.com/marketing-youtube-marketing.php
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Checkout http://www.mklink.com/getstarted today and don’t look back!
’till Next Time,
Mike Knight. MKLINK Internet Marketing Tips